A2 Photography Summer Home Learning
Searching for the miraculous - Who were the Surrealists and why was photography so important to them?
The surrealists are a group of artists that were originally a "small group of writers and artists" who take the idea of rationalism and literary realism in their photography. It was believed by the surrealists that the power of the imagination was suppressed by the conscious mind, focusing their work to base around their unconscious mind while adding this to reality, which then made it a taboo to produce work using your conscious mind, restricting it to being reality and only reality. Surrealists are interesting in automatic potential in cameras, this means that they are able to take an image without removing any of the wrong. Compared to a painting that takes a while you have time to remove something you don't like, and pictures are near instant when you press the shutter, meaning you can't remove the wrong.
Serious play - What role did chance play in the work of the surrealists?
Surrealists are very open to chance, they are extremely open to chance and automatism in their work. William S. Burroughs is a surrealist and a core member of the Beat Generation. He developed what he called the "cut-up technique". This is completely reliant on chance as it is used to dictate the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources.
The surrealists are a group of artists that were originally a "small group of writers and artists" who take the idea of rationalism and literary realism in their photography. It was believed by the surrealists that the power of the imagination was suppressed by the conscious mind, focusing their work to base around their unconscious mind while adding this to reality, which then made it a taboo to produce work using your conscious mind, restricting it to being reality and only reality. Surrealists are interesting in automatic potential in cameras, this means that they are able to take an image without removing any of the wrong. Compared to a painting that takes a while you have time to remove something you don't like, and pictures are near instant when you press the shutter, meaning you can't remove the wrong.
Serious play - What role did chance play in the work of the surrealists?
Surrealists are very open to chance, they are extremely open to chance and automatism in their work. William S. Burroughs is a surrealist and a core member of the Beat Generation. He developed what he called the "cut-up technique". This is completely reliant on chance as it is used to dictate the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources.
Activity 1 - Parallel universe
Set 1Despite these being the normal old plane view pictures that not what I had in mind. I wanted to think of an interesting way that could be a parallel universe and the idea that really stuck to me is that the universe is huge. So I wanted to try and create images that show a huge distance, but they show more or less nothing. This is because I live in London, a busy city home to 8.63 million people. But what if that world was never there, all this space was just never used and everything was just sky and clouds.
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Set 2Within these images I wanted to try and capture them from a different perspective, as if I had shrunk and everything was huge. As I spent my holiday abroad I was surrounded in flags, mountains and everything else huge. So I adapted the idea on what if the normal things to us, appeared smaller to other people; so I tried to create this effect within my images.
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Activity 2 - Chance
Set 1There is a park in Cartagena which is on top of a mountain, this mountain over looks the city, the beach, and some old roman buildings and more mountains. I have a setting on my camera which lets me say "cheese", "capture", "take" etc in order to take a picture. Therefore I decided to point my phone somewhere, and shout to everyone "cheese" while it took a picture. I also had an issue with uploading my images, for some reason Weebly glitched them out, most of them I deleted but I decided to keep a few. This is because it's clearly chance, I had no control that the image would glitch, and how it was going to glitch. However I think the colours look pretty cool and it almost makes it look like the image has been merged like a collage.
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Set 2While walking around I noticed loads of weird things on the floor, bugs, paint splats, water marks loads of things that people just walk past. I decided to photograph some of the things that happened by chance for example the paint spill, and the footstep in the pavement. This is because it's chance is there, maybe someone didn't know the cement was wet so they accidentally walked into it. I also aimed my camera down while walking along the streets taking images not knowing what I was gonna end up with. A lot of these were out of focus due to the fact I forgot to put "image stabilizing" on.. so I deleted most of those. However after that I ended up with a variety of strange pictures. Again some of these pictures were glitched out, I think its because of windows 10 and weebly but I really don't know, however it looks like there is a filter being over laid half the image, which gives a nice contrast to the image.
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Evaluating using the formal elements
This photo is taken from the series "Une Regrettable Affaire" by Roger Livet, 1947.The picture focuses on the woman’s facial expressions, despite the fact she is just sitting on a bed looking at something in a glass, we first thing we notice is how she reacts to what’s under the glass. The colours to the image are very simple being black, white, and gray. However the darkest colours are in the middle which naturally draws out our attention. This is possibly because the Livet wants people to look at the women first, so we don’t look around the room picturing where she is, and getting the sense that we are in the room staring right at her. Also the woman wearing such dark clothes helps us see her face clearly despite the grainy feel to the picture. This is so we can see deeper than her actual facial expressions, looking at her real emotions which are given off by her body language. This makes us think about what’s in the jar, like it’s something important to her and has a deeper meaning to her, however because no one knows what it is, we get the point that it means something to the subject which we clearly see from her face, and it’s not necessary to see what’s in the jar because that's not what makes the picture what it is; however it leaves the viewer curious to what it could be. The texture of the images appears soft due to the way the colours in the background blend in with each other, which is interesting because it’s quite a hard image but maybe he softened it so we can empathise her so we see her in a different way. The emotions given off are suggestively sad so maybe Livet wanted to make the image appear soft so we can really feel how she’s feeling. The shadow on the wall makes us feel like she's alone, despite the fact there is a camera and a photographer standing in the room with her, the way the shadow is set makes it look like thats her only support. The idea that the curtain is in the image suggests that we are looking at something we shouldn’t be. Maybe she is having a private moment that is upsetting to her, and the curtain is revealing it to us so we can see how she feels towards the jar. This is also because she isn’t looking at the camera she is completely ignoring it as if she was lonely, and that the jar is really important. The patterns and lines and mainly seen on the bed sheets which is only on one side of the picture as if it’s not important. The picture is covered with right angles, the walls are vertical and everything is straight. The only lines that aren’t actually straight is her collar which has been highlighted by the contrasting black and white colour.
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Create a photo series
As a class we were asked to look at some images which had been created by different photographers, and then pick out the ones we felt had a connection. The three images I picked out just so happened to be by the same photographer - Sally mann. I have looked at various sections of her work in the past, but I wasn't too confident with the images of her children, so I didn't know they were all connected. The first time looking at all of the pictures they all kind of felt like a normal picture, they didn't really say anything to me they were all just there. When I took a closer look at these three images they all struck me instantly. This is because they all look ever so normal, the girls are posing as if they are a model standing in a studio. However the background to the images all show something different and completely contrasts with the subject in the photo. For example the image on the far right shows a little girl smiling wearing a dress, standing next to a dead deer. Most people wouldn't associate these two things with each other but in this picture it works.
Similar elements
I didn't edit any of these images, they happened to glitch out when I uploaded them, however I really like the effect that it gives to the picture because it gives it new tones and adds lines to my photo. Also they all relate by the straight lines that they all have, and the one image that didn't happen to get glitched out is the image of the cat behind a fence which already has straight lines. They also all have different patterns in the images which also have different textures seen throughout the foreground and the background. When taking these images I wanted to try to have two things in the picture, as sally man has the subject and then something else going on I wanted to try and replicate this. Therefore I tried to make sure there was always something else happening in the image.
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Francis Picbia & Alfred Stieglitz
EquivalenceBased on the work of Francis Picbia and Alfred Stieglitz, I decided to take pictures in the same style. I walked around and took a picture of something that I felt really stuck me and made me feel a certain way. As I take a second look at the images the meaning changes a little, and I feel something different. For example the image of all the tiles on the floor. Originally I felt lost, like I didn't really know where I was and what I was doing because the tiles went on forever and ever. But as I take a second look the structure of it all makes me think that maybe it actually suggests the opposite. Everything is perfectly inline with each other which made me feel on track, like I was really organised and knew what I was doing following the path.
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Photomontage
After researching photographers such as John heartfield and Hannah Hoch who use the technique photomontage to create their artwork. I created two different photomontages of my own; the first one was created completely by chance. I picked out two images, one created by Sally Mann, and the other by Lewis Baltz. The images I picked were brought to me due to the fact I felt they contrasted with each other, they both instantly popped out to me. I done this because I felt like it would help to highlight the colours in both picture, so you could clearly see that it’s a photomontage. The first image I created I left to chance; I turned the photo upside down so I couldn’t see the print, and then began to tear out random shapes. Once I felt like I had ripped up the picture enough I then overlaid it with my other image, creating the photomontage left down to chance. The next photomontage I made I had all the control over, I carefully ripped up the image to remove some of the geometrical lines in the image. I done this just so I could mix up the image and maybe give it a different meaning as there won’t be as many straight lines. There are a few well known photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and John Baldessari who also prefer having more control when manipulating their pictures. For example John baldessari is commonly representing for placing dots on people's faces in his images. He has control where he puts these dots so he is the one putting the notion in his images and not chance. However he also works with chance, within John Baldessari's book "Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a straight line". He plays with chance to throw these balls in the air at a different height meaning the background will change slightly, and the positioning of the balls will always be different. Artists who rely on chance within their work include Olivier Valsecchi and John Sargent Barnard. Their work has been created with ink, they place it onto a piece of paper and then fold it up so the ink can spread into all different parts of the paper. Once unfolded they are given their chance based artwork in which they had no idea on what the outcome would be. I prefer this type of work, chance can bring you new ideas that you wouldn’t of ever thought of doing.
Cut and Paste
I created these images by cutting them out with a scalpel and pasting them onto another image, hence the reason it’s called cut and paste. The images I used are my images that I have taken which I felt like had similar elements. I didn’t let chance effect the image at all, I precisely cut out exactly what I wanted to, to create my photomontage. I felt like the same effect could be achieve on photoshop with straighter lines and a cleaner look. Therefore once I had created my paper images I put the originals onto photoshop and went to work like that. The difference between the photoshopped images and the paper cut outs is that one of them has chance. I put both images onto the same canvas and made them the same size. I then began to randomly cut the image on top without knowing what would come from underneath. I wanted to include chance into my work due to the fact surrealists are very open to chance and feel like it’s a very important aspect of surrealism. Chance is used by a wide number of surrealist artist such as Marcel Duchamp whom is one of the most famous surrealist artist known. Duchamp believed the role of chance can open up a whole different world of art such as he's work of the '3 Stoppages'. Other games such as the Exquisite Corpse has chance playing a very important role, as chance creates the game. This is why I decided to play with chance within my photo montage as surrealists are very open to chance. Also while cutting the images I tried not to think about what I was doing, as another important part to surrealists they use automatism therefore I kind of just done what I felt was right. I didn't want to manipulate the image, I wanted to just cut it and not let my feelings take over until after creating the image. Other artist who create images while not thinking about it is a man called Alfred Stieglitz whom took an abstract image which involved a sky and tree, with no meaning of capturing the image at the time. The Surrealist had a deep interest in photo montage from Dada, who used a technique to disrupt the main easel painting of the art world.
Man Ray
Man Ray was born in 1890 and was an American painter, filmmaker and photographer. He is mostly known for his contributions to the Dada and Surrealist movements much like Hannah Hoch. He met another artist - Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and worked with him in initiating a proto-Dada movement in New York that same year. Man Ray had been influenced by many artists including Pablo Picasso, Alfred Stieglitz, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray's work evolved over time and in 1913 he began experimenting with a cubist style of painting which then moved towards abstraction. Along with Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Ray became a leading figure in the Dada movement in New York.
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Hannah Hoch
Hannah Hoch was born in 1889 and was a German Dada artist, most renown for her collection of photomontage. She was the main female figure in the Berlin Dada group if not the only. She had an affair with Berlin Dada artist Raoul Hausmann which fueled Hoch to write her short story titled "The Painter" which challenged the roles of men and women in society. Their relationship finally came to an end after seven years, because she was spurred on by their different opinions on art. Hoch's main motivation and idea behind her work was her criticisms of the German government. She used text from the mass media to create her photomontages, and supposedly preferred metaphoric imagery to that of the direct text-based confrontation. Despite her rejection of the German government, most of Hoch's work is based around gender issues and reflects a feminist point of view of society in the 1920's on wards.
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Mari Mahr
Mari Mahr was born in Santiago de Chile in 1941. From Mahr's work we get an idea of the personal and cultrual influences on her life. Each small collection of black and white images she creates are like a mystery for the viewers to work out due to the fact they're so random. For example in 'presents for Susanna' She places a small gift over the image of a childhood friend, this is representing her offering a present to the past. However if you didn't know anything about Mahr, this would just look like a child with a flower over her head.
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My response
The Rorschach Test
The Rorschach test is a psychological test that certain subjects would be asked to look at one of the ink blots, and then have to say what they see. This test would determine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning. This is similar to Alfred Stieglitzs work on equivalents, it includes a deep conscious response but not one that can easily be found. I personally really like this because there's no right or wrong answer and you're free to completely express yourself over an image of inkblots.
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My response
Using the Rorschach test for inspiration, I created my own ink blots. I found the best results were when I spread the ink all over the page and not just in the centre. I can't see any particular images or representations in the first two tries, however in the third I see an elongated skull in the centre.
Surrealist photomontage
The Surrealists and photomontage
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The Dadaists and photomontage
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Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun was a surrealist who said she was agender. Her and her partner Marcel Moore collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. The two of them moved on to publishing articles and novels, notably in the periodical "Mercure de France", and befriended Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange and Robert Desnos. Cahun also recorded her dreams and went on to illustating them through photomontages.
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Grete Stern
Grete Stern was born in Germany to a Jewish family, and in Weimar Berlin, she and Ellen Auerbach had a photography studio called ringl + pit that specialized in advertising. From 1948 to 1950, Stern was hired by a womens’ magazine to “illustrate” the dreams that readers of the magazine submitted. She made 150 photomontages, called Suenos (dreams), that comprise perhaps the most brilliant and telling psychological document ever made of the inner lives of women of that era.
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John Sargent Barnard
As it was really difficult finding actual artists who create images that are mirrored and flipped I was only left with the good old Google Search. The only person I could find was John Sargent Barnard who only ever created 4 images within this style.
Nigel Henderson
In the late 1930s Henderson developed paintings inspired by Yves Tanguy. Through his mother's ties, Henderson met leading artists of avant-garde such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
In the early 1950s he was a member of the Independent Group and taught at the Central School of Art with Anthony Froshaug, Edward Wright and Eduardo Paolozzi. With Paolozzi and others he participated in the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the ICA in London. He achieved abnormal effects by using various techniques such as altering negatives and placing images on light-sensitive paper to create Photograms. He also took part in the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. At This is Tomorrow, Henderson exhibited a large and disturbing image entitled “Head of Man.” Collaboration continued beyond This is Tomorrow,with Banham authoring a book on New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? in 1966. |
Wolfgang Tilmas
I really like how Tilmas presents his work, this lets the viewer see the images the way they want to see them. For example they may choose to stand up close to view them one by one. Or stand back so they can view all of them as one. As all of my images are different scales I thought about creating an installation similar to Tilmas', meaning it's completely up to the viewer to get their own representation of my work.
Trip to V&A gallery and the Science Museum
During the trip I picked out certain images that really caught my eye for reasons I couldn't explain. There were also images that I took my chance, for example someone or something was in the way of the lens when I took the image as I wasn't looking down the view finder.
When taking these images I want to do keep in mind that surrealism heavily relies on use of chance to take the “perfect” image. Therefore on the school trip I decided to take images without looking through the lens. I wanted 2 take as many images as possible because I knew that some of these will be better than others considering the fact I wasn't actually looking at what I was taking images of. I really like how these images have came out because I wanted to focus on lines, making it really obvious that there's a line I'm focusing on which I feel I have successfully done.
Final Outcome
I wanted to really focus on giving my images a Rorschach feel to them so I decided to splat developer on my photograms randomly, and then folder the paper in half. This would mean that my images would only develop on the parts that were spread however this didn't quite go to plan. Due to the fact the paper is glossy and the developer is wet it easily ran off not developing the images the way I hoped they would.
Response #2
These images are all digital as they are images from Photoshop as I wanted to see if I could create the Rorschach effect without any errors. After doing research on John Sargent Barnard I wanted to take his approach with my image so I flipped them and mirrored them on Photoshop and really liked the look it gave.
I then decided to add colour to the images too see how similar I could get my images to Barndards. My favourite image of his is a chemigram which I had tried to do but failed for numerous reasons so I really wanted to see if I could get the same blue that a chemigram would, digitally.
Response #3
I then wanted to move a little more to perception and chance using the same four images I created at the start on Photoshop. So I converted them back to black and white and began creating photograms out of the images. This meant that not the whole of the image would show in the photogram as I was able to cut paper to whatever size I wanted to. Also it meant that chance would be a big factor in my images as it decides the final result, as every photogram is different they all end up looking like different pictures in the end which is something I wanted to work on further.
Final images
These are the images I used to create my final outcome, not all images are there as they didn't fit in the scanner however a large portion of my images are there.
Installation Images
As it's hard mounting a whole bunch of images every time I want to display my images for someone to see, I decided to take a variety of my images that is just a simple small portion. This means when someone wants to see my images it won't take too long to set it up, but the meaning can still be there just smaller.